A thread for Democrats Only
POSTED BY: THGRRI
UPDATED: Sunday, September 6, 2026 15:36
VIEWED: 755368
PAGE 510 of 725
Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:I was thinking about writing a Firefly story about a spaceship full of Trumptards.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:"Russian Troll" is shorthand for Trumptard Dishonesty about their true goals.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
That's the Post-Trump Democrat playbook in perpetuity.
Nope. "Russian Troll" is "I don't have a valid argument, so I'm going to just be a dick."
Go for it buddy.
I promise I will read the first sentence of it before moving on to something productive.
--------------------------------------------------
" 'You're like the Nazis' is the new 'I don't like you'. That disqualifies her from marching around planet Who-Gives-a-Shit in a helmet? ~Bill Maher
PSA: Don't click on any links in Second's posts. He's trying to fish your private information out of you.
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
“But there is no common ground between the people who defend these things and those who want to have them removed.”
Fight over whether to change name of Robert E. Lee High School leaves scars in Baytown
It has been 51 years since Elmer Cartwright and a handful of other leaders in Baytown’s Black community first wrote to their school board in 1970.
The district had begun integrating schools several years prior, and Black students, including Cartwright’s daughter Karrie, came home with stories of inequitable treatment and racism they faced. They said it was even baked into the name of the school his daughter was transferred to: Robert E. Lee High School.
They asked the board to change it, but trustees refused.
Last September, Cartwright’s grandson Kevin Craven asked the board to do the same and remove the name of the Confederate general. Again, it refused.
“I never thought I would be carrying this mantle,” said Craven, who now lives in Pearland. “There’s a certain level of irony that here it is, 50-plus years later and we’re still having that same conversation about renaming a school that ultimately is offensive.”
The Goose Creek CISD board voted 4-3 against changing the name of Lee High in September, opting instead to create a committee to study the idea.
On March 1, the group issued its final recommendation: take no action.
GCCISD Board President Jessica Woods said the board has not yet decided if it will put a proposed name change on a future agenda.
Baytown’s Robert E. Lee High School is one of only three campuses left in Texas named after the Confederate general, according to a Houston Chronicle review of Texas Education Agency records and published news stories. There had been 13 campuses named after Lee in June 2019, but a dozen of those changed their names following protests and conversations sparked by the May 2020 killing of George Floyd.
Debates about whether to change or replace symbols of the Confederacy have been ongoing since the Civil War ended in 1865, said Karen Cox, a professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte and author of the forthcoming book “No Common Ground: Confederate Monuments and the Ongoing Fight for Racial Justice.” However, she said nationwide momentum for removing Confederate icons began to change in 2015, after a white man killed nine people at a historically Black church in Charleston, S.C.
“What’s happened since the Charleston massacre is, you have an awful tragedy involving racial violence, people will get upset, people will discuss it and some (Confederate symbols) will be removed,” Cox said. “But there is no common ground between the people who defend these things and those who want to have them removed.”
https://www.houstonchronicle.com/news/houston-texas/education/article/
robert-e-lee-name-change-baytown-school-16049791.php
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Republicans do not take policy seriously.
The most important reason Trump failed to repeal the Affordable Care Act was that Republicans did not think through hard choices, make the compromises necessary to build alliances within the G.O.P. and get the thing done.
That same loss of seriousness inhibited their ability to effectively oppose Biden’s rescue plan. They didn’t do the hard thinking required to settle on a plausible line of attack. So while Democrats were pushing through tax credits that will cut child poverty nearly in half and subsidies that will make health insurance more affordable, Republicans were focused on cancel culture and Dr. Seuss.
And looking forward, why should we expect the G.O.P. to do any better in opposing Biden’s longer-term initiatives?
To block this push, Republicans will have to come up with something beyond boilerplate denunciations of socialists killing jobs. Will they? Probably not. Bear in mind that both infrastructure spending and raising taxes on the rich are very popular. Democrats seem united on at least the principle of an invest-and-tax plan — and these days they seem pretty good at turning agreement in principle into actual legislation.
The prospects for a big spend-and-tax bill are quite good because Democrats know what they want to achieve and are willing to put in the work to make it happen — while Republicans don’t and aren’t.
More at https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/25/opinion/republicans-biden-stimulus.
html
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Quote:
Originally posted by second:
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/25/opinion/republicans-biden-stimulus.
html
Remember, the Roomba argues that the NYT isn't a total Lefty shill site.
--------------------------------------------------
" 'You're like the Nazis' is the new 'I don't like you'. That disqualifies her from marching around planet Who-Gives-a-Shit in a helmet? ~Bill Maher
PSA: Don't click on any links in Second's posts. He's trying to fish your private information out of you.
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Quote:6ix, you are using too many words. Compressing the Trumptard political science message to fewer words: "Democrats are socialists killing jobs." That's five. Go for three: "Democrats are communists." How about two words? I'm not sure the Trumptard message can be compressed that much ("Heil Trump!" is a possibility) and still be a sentence expressing a complete idea on which most Trumptards agree, but I am pretty sure most Trumptards agree that the New York Times is a lefty shill site. It is not, unless reality has a lefty bias, but when have Trumptards ever stopped talking rubbish?
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Remember, the Roomba argues that the NYT isn't a total Lefty shill site.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Fixing capitalism: Capitalism is just a collection of human decisions. We can change it if we want to.
March 26, 2021
It’s easy to spot the growing wealth of Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and other entrepreneurs who made their fortunes with publicly traded companies. The Robert Brockmans of the world are harder to spot.
If you don’t know who Brockman is, I don’t blame you. The Texas software billionaire, who has never appeared on Forbes’ vaunted list of the wealthiest Americans, is allegedly responsible for the largest tax fraud in US history. What’s more, new economic research suggests he is hardly the only high-earning American dodging taxes under the radar.
Brockman is alleged to have used a complex network of offshore entities in the Cayman Islands to conceal $2 billion from US tax collectors. The scheme was discovered only when some of Brockman’s salesforce sued him, alleging that some of the revenue flowing to foreign trusts belonged to them as commissions.
That money is among an estimated $175 billion in potential tax revenue that the top 1% of American earners conceal from the US Internal Revenue Service (IRS) each year, representing more than a third of unpaid taxes, according to a new paper (pdf) from economists at the IRS and several universities.
Notably, the findings also suggest that the US suffers from more economic inequality than previously understood, since most measures of relative prosperity rely on tax data that undercounts the income of the wealthiest Americans. The focus on rich people whose wealth is mainly in publicly disclosed corporate stock lets high-earners with harder-to-track incomes slip under the radar.
The new findings derive from comparing the results of random audits with voluntary disclosure programs that allowed Americans to reveal undisclosed offshore holdings and pay back taxes without being subject to criminal prosecution or penalties. By comparing the various data sets, the researchers were able to make new estimates of tax avoidance across the income distribution.
The researchers argue that random audits are not designed to find sophisticated tax evasion in offshore accounts, and that auditors generally lack the resources to compare reported pass-through income to the actual activities of the underlying businesses.
This jibes with other research that suggests investing more money in tax enforcement would result in a net gain for the US budget. One recent study found that upping the tax man’s budget by $100 billion over 10 years could result in more than $1.5 trillion in additional unpaid tax collected. After years of budget cuts by Republican lawmakers, new Democratic majorities in Congress could lead to a funding boost for the tax agency.
Those gains could come from deeper investigations and the deterrent effect that they might provide, but also just doing the fundamentals: The Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration reported last year that the agency simply didn’t audit more than 800,000 high-income taxpayers who stopped filing tax returns and are estimated to owe nearly $46 billion.
https://qz.com/1989014/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:6ix, you are using too many words.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Remember, the Roomba argues that the NYT isn't a total Lefty shill site.
Nope. I said what needed to be said.
--------------------------------------------------
" 'You're like the Nazis' is the new 'I don't like you'. That disqualifies her from marching around planet Who-Gives-a-Shit in a helmet? ~Bill Maher
PSA: Don't click on any links in Second's posts. He's trying to fish your private information out of you.
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Culture War Over Wolves -- Montana Gov. Greg Gianforte (R) killed a radio-collared wolf from Yellowstone National Park.
A typical Montanan, their political views are all across the board. We have these college towns, Bozeman and Missoula, where you’ve got a lot of pretty liberal environmentalists. I’m sure they would be super angry that he killed a wolf so close to the park, and that it was radio-collared.
And then you have the super conservative contingent in Montana, including a lot of people who have moved here in recent years from places like California or Texas. They’re coming with a much more Trumpian conservatism that we haven’t really seen much in the state prior to, even, the pandemic. A lot of those new folks are not going to care whatsoever that the governor did this. In fact, they might like the governor more because he did this.
Within Montana, there are more questions. How did he expect to check his traps every day while also serving as governor? You have to check traps at least every 48 hours. But ethically, you should be checking it every day. And those traps were set two and a half or three hours south of the Capitol. It’s a very time-intensive thing to do, to trap. Was that the best use of the governor’s time?
The governor told a local reporter that the traps have been out since January, which would be at least two weeks prior to trapping that wolf. This is where it gets a little wonky. Gianforte was setting traps on a private ranch owned by a big conservative media mogul. And that guy’s ranch manager (who’s also the vice president of the Montana Trappers Association)—his name was also on these traps. And so there’s a good chance that the ranch manager was actually checking the traps for Gianforte. And maybe Gianforte was lucky enough that he was just down there on a federal holiday, and there was the wolf, after two or more weeks of waiting for the animal to get trapped. Was it just serendipitous? Or was the wolf trapped, and the ranch manager found it and called Gianforte? I don’t want to say either way, but that’s my biggest question. If the ranch manager called Gianforte, and Gianforte drove or flew over to kill it, that would have broken the state hunting regulations because you’re supposed to kill it or release it immediately upon seeing it. It’s the more humane thing to do.
Wolves are super controversial. In the West, they do kill livestock. Some people rely on cows and sheep to make a living. On the other hand, Montana relies on a lot of tourism. Maybe you went to Yellowstone National Park to see those wolves. The wolves are a big boon for our tourism industry. And so it’s just kind of a very classic push-and-pull between those two camps. Americans had pretty much eradicated the wolf from the West up until 1995, when they were reintroduced in Yellowstone National Park. And so it’s still very fresh. They’re like a symbol for the kind of culture wars that happen out West.
There were major hurdles reporting this story. I was frustrated with the governor’s office for not answering the questions I posed to them and for not making the governor available for an interview. I think that that’s something we’ve noticed since the Trump era. Gianforte is famously antagonistic towards reporters. There has been a culture in the past of openness among both Republicans and Democrats. And it’s been frustrating to watch that culture of openness change. It doesn’t feel very Montanan.
https://web.archive.org/web/20210328101408/https://slate.com/news-and-
politics/2021/03/montana-governor-greg-gianforte-yellowstone-wolf-reporter-interview.html
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
lol
--------------------------------------------------
" 'You're like the Nazis' is the new 'I don't like you'. That disqualifies her from marching around planet Who-Gives-a-Shit in a helmet? ~Bill Maher
PSA: Don't click on any links in Second's posts. He's trying to fish your private information out of you.
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Quote:Jeff Bezos is pissed at Unions. If his employees have any sense, and there is strong doubt about how sensible they are, they will piss on Bezos.
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
lol
Bezos and other Amazon leaders are on edge as the company is facing the largest union election in its history at its Bessemer, Alabama warehouse. Election results will be tallied early this week, and Amazon officials understand that if a majority of the employee voters vote to unionize, it could set off a chain reaction at other facilities, with the potential to force the e-commerce giant to overhaul how it manages its hundreds of thousands of front-line US workers. There was terror inside the executive ranks of Amazon the last time a union election was held at a US Amazon facility — and that was only a small subset of a warehouse’s workforce, the majority of whom voted against unionization. That vote happened in early 2014, and consisted of just 27 technicians and mechanics at an Amazon warehouse in Delaware. In Alabama, though, the stakes are much higher with nearly 6,000 workers eligible to vote. Bezos knows all of this well.
https://www.vox.com/recode/2021/3/28/22354604/amazon-twitter-bernie-sa
nders-jeff-bezos-union-alabama-elizabeth-warren
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME